December 2018

My friend C makes the BEST spaghetti, and I know it is because she takes the time to properly sautee her onions, garlic and other herbs before making her homemade sauce. For someone like me who rushes through cooking on a good day, that's an impressive feat. I normally make semi-homemade meals, which consist of tomato sauce mixed with a bunch of my herbs and a hope for the best! Still, I had no idea that there were so many ways to prepare spaghetti.

Hot cocoa, whether spiked or not, is the drink of the season. I've enjoyed so many cups of cocoa this month that you'd think I'd be sick of it but I'm not yet! Some are weirder than others (a church event we attend serves a recipe made with sweetened condensed milk), and some are just plain delicious (mixing in cocoa with my coffee: hello, mocha!). I get a giant tub of mix for my daughter's winter get-togethers with friends and it lasts us maybe two events, but she likes the Swiss Miss packets best.

The claim that millennials ruin everything is so irritating not only because anyone young is often considered a millennial (some of us are in our mid-30s, thanks, and the yongest of us are 22), but because we 80s kids are being blamed for industries tanking when it's really not our fault. (That's not to say nothing is our fault; plenty of other things are!) The 80s showed us a time of excess, where people bought, bought, bought and wasted, wasted, wasted despite Captain Planet's warnings.

It seems weird that comedians should be awarded Grammy Awards in the first place. Maybe they should have their own comedian awards rather than being awarded just because they had an album made of their jokes and talking. I LOVE comedy, I love some comedians very much, but Grammys are supposed to be for music, right? If not, could anyone who read an audiobook or any politician who made a speech that was recorded also get a Grammy?

Do you know someone who might like a shirt with an enormous pocket on the outside, a baseball cap that doubles as a phone charger or a tiny lazy Susan for the pantry or fridge? Maybe he or she would LOVE this Chewbacca Bandolier seatbelt cover (I know I would!). You can find all of these things and more at the Oddity Mall, a curation company that scours the web for the strangest finds and where to buy them.

With Christmas and New Year's quickly approaching, we've been looking into fun family read-alouds to enjoy with one another. We love seasonal read-alouds, especially for Halloween, but Christmas has been getting trickier now that our tween is a teen and not into our favorites like The Polar Express so much anymore. While she'll enjoy them when her two-year-old cousin visits, we need something a bit more advanced for her these days. I have Nicholas St.

There are four hundred and forty eight operating commercial nuclear power reactors in the world today. Fifty more reactors are under construction. Most of these reactors are water-cooled and water-moderated. The fuel elements in these reactors are mostly zirconium alloys. These alloys are stable and effective up to a temperature of six hundred and sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit.

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation was established in 1943 in south central Washington State. The plutonium that was used in World War II to bomb Nagasaki, Japan was produced at the Reservation. During the Cold War, most of the plutonium for the sixty thousand nuclear warheads in the U.S.

Potential contamination carried by space vehicles is a major concern to the public and private space industry. Satellites and space craft components are manufactured in clear rooms to prevent the possibility of biological contamination of astronomical bodies. However, recently a new type of contamination was discovered.